Inaugural LCL Master cohort celebrates successful year

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Published on Friday, 29 June 2018

Students from the Master in Logistics and Supply Chain Management celebrated the successful completion of their studies on 28 June, presenting their research to their professors, peers and LCL industry partners.

The Luxembourg Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management (LCL) welcomed its first cohort of Master students for the 2017-2018 academic year. At the start of the year, LCL Director Prof. Benny Mantin had warned the group that it would be a year with much coffee and many bumps in the road. These challenges have now been overcome, he said at the Research Fest in June, congratulating the cohort on their thesis projects.

These projects, carried out in cooperation with an industry partner, were presented by the prospective graduates, followed by questions from the audience. The theses covered a wide range of topics, including supply chain transparency, digitisation, price forecasting, carbon foot printing, and customer profitability analysis. The approaches used to address these topics ranged from extended literature reviews and interviews to machine learning and mathematical optimisation.

Prof. Yossi Sheffi from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) visited the LCL for the Research Fest, emphasising the importance of supply chain management for businesses to develop and retain a competitive advantage. The graduates in logistics and supply chain management are uniquely equipped to address the challenges faced by industry, he added.

‘Passion, perseverance and dedication’

Students were also congratulated by the Master programme’s Course Director, Associate Prof. Joachim Arts, who shared some of the experiences from the year of studies at the LCL. Students received a certificate for the successful completion of their coursework at the MIT in January 2018. In addition to joining the MIT SCALE alumni network, they will officially graduate from the programme at the University of Luxembourg’s graduation week in December.

Student valedictory speaker Jérôme Schank spoke of some of the sacrifices that the cohort had made to be among the pioneers of the LCL Master, as they “went out of their comfort zone, quit their jobs, left their countries and families behind to embrace this opportunity to learn.” With 13 different countries represented among 15 students, Jérôme said one of the highlights of the programme was its diversity. “All of us had different backgrounds when we embarked on this journey together,” he concluded. “But today, we are leaving as the graduates from the same institute with a common goal: to be successful in our career. All of us are gearing up for the next phase of our life with passion, perseverance and dedication.”